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INTERVIEWS

Slouch

Having a passion for electronic music since the early 90s with an active involvement in sound design and music production since around 2001, Rubens have just released their debut full length album Carnivalesque on local label Herb Recordings.

UDR: Briefly introduce yourselves.

Mark: I'm 28 and originally from just outside Glasgow, having moved into the city around 8 years ago.

Gordon: I'm 29 and from a small town in Ayrshire but moved to Glasgow around the same time as Mark. I have, however, returned to my home town about 18 months ago to seek a quieter life.

UDR: What brought you together?

Rubens: We were already mates as a result of a mutual acquaintance and had both been living in similar areas of Glasgow at the time, and often hooked up at gigs at some of the city's more credible techno nights. As chance would have it, we both found ourselves looking for flatmates around mid-2004 and we shared a flat for about 9 months into early '05. At that point Mark had been tinkering with music for a while under a solo guise (~ism) with a release on Opaque Channel as well as some self-released stuff. When we were sharing a flat Gordon got quite interested in the mechanics of making music, and at the same time we had discovered an unusually high degree of shared taste and explored a lot of new music over that period. It wasn't long before Gordon got to grips with Abelton Live™ and music production in general and we started to work on stuff together. Rubens grew out of that.

UDR: Describe the evolution of your creative process, individually and collectively.

Rubens: One of the most important factors in our creative process has been the tools themselves - Ableton Live™ in particular. It allows for a much less linear writing process and encourages you to work in a live fashion (unsurprisingly) which really lends itself to working together as a duo. In terms of the Rubens sound, we've inadvertently arrived at a sound that brings together shared elements of our individual tastes; coming about by working together in the same space usually. There's no set method in our madness; some tracks were written mainly together working on the project, while others are a result of us working separately and exchanging material. Both of us working with the same tools makes it really easy to work in this way, even if we usually come together in the studio to finish things off and bring it to a joint conclusion.

UDR: When did your appreciation of sound begin? Describe some of your earliest experiments.

Mark: I'd say my appreciation of music began fairly late, in my teens anyway, when I started getting into stuff, but a real appreciation of sound didn't come about until later - probably when I was really starting to take in a lot electronic music. Probably even later, when I first started fiddling with production and went through a phase of fancying myself as a DJ. I was rubbish though. Couldn't beatmatch for buttons! Though, when I think about it - I did play violin for 5 years when I was a kid, from the age of 9. So I guess that constituted some formal training, I certainly wasn't tone deaf… As far as my first experiments with music making goes, I started out making harder techno and acid stuff (under the ~ism guise) much to the amusement of mates at the time!

Gordon: I have always been into music in some form or other although my tastes have changed a great deal over the years. I also started with a set of decks at first but again was never very good and it was when i met Mark that i took an active interest in making music and have not looked back since. I never had any formal training as such although i did play recorder for about 4 years at school but i don't think that counts!

UDR: What does 'Rubens' mean? Do you have a specific concept in mind?

Mark: I'll leave this one for Gordon… but broadly speaking it means 'a load of rubbish'.

Gordon: I always hate explaining where the name came from as it sounds so stupid. I won't go into it in detail but in short we used to use the word Rubens to mean, as Mark says, 'a load of rubbish or a load of sh*t. When it came to choosing a name I think one of us mentioned it as a joke but it stuck.

UDR: Describe life in Glasgow as it relates to Rubens. In what capacity does Glasgow affect your work?

Mark: Hmmm, where to begin. Glasgow is what it is. An increasingly busy, growing city with a thoroughly vibrant pedigree for electronic music. But to find it, you need to look hard - and scrape through the seemingly inexhaustible myre of student pop and indie rock that seems to dominate urban life these days. I guess the fact that we both spent a lot of years out in techno clubs and stuff like that (which have since waned a lot and lost a bit of their sheen) was a big driving factor in us wanting to make our own stuff…since we just weren't hearing much around us at the time. The fact that it was in Glasgow that we both shared a flat and that we were increasingly fed up with what was going on outside our four walls... that was probably the main motivation for the Rubens project finding life.

Gordon: I used to like Glasgow but now I hate it, it's as simple as that. That's why I moved away to the country again. I still only live half an hour from it so have easy access to the city any time I need to visit Mark or other friends. Having more space where I live now has allowed us to start to construct a proper studio, we already have one at my house at the moment but will be expanding it very soon. Rubens was born in Glasgow so I suppose it can't all be bad.

UDR: To what degree are your final pieces structured, improvised, indeterminate?

Rubens: Most of what we do is based around Ableton Live™, which Mark migrated over to around the same time as Gordon was starting to get to grips with it. It's flexibility as a writing tool is something else, encouraging you to write in a real-time live fashion (unsurprisingly) with the music always playing - rather than the stop-start conventional sequencer process. It encourages knitting together the elements of a track, and in working the sound in real-time as you go. We use a multitude of other software but we are building a healthy hardware collection as well.

UDR: Does Rubens perform live?

Rubens: We played with fellow Herb artists Mosca and Engine7 at Tronic (one of Glasgow's leading electronic nights) on the 18th of May; a four-man affair with Dextro (Groenland Records/Border Community) on live drums and The Lava Experiments (Herb Recordings) on guitar.

UDR: Talk about your debut album Carnivalesque.

Rubens: It wasn't until we did the deal with Herb that we seriously started to look at producing an album from what material we had at the time (2 or 3 tracks) and with a view to get writing. Right from the outset, the themes that were apparent in our work, including the stuff that never made it onto the album as such, were of positivity and a sense of the upbeat about it. Which was in contrast to a lot of the music that we were both into - a lot of which was dark and often harsher stuff. It wasn't until mid-2006 that the album came to have a name. It was actually lifted from a comment made by a good acquaintance and fellow musician (Fieldtriqp), when describing one of the tracks. I can't remember which one now. But it all seemed to fit for us, and I think from that point on the remaining tracks came together in the sense of this funfair/carnival music idea - but always with a strong electronic ethic.

UDR: What does 'finished' sound like to Rubens?

Rubens: It sounds like something needs to, in order to get the hairs on the back of our necks on end and a smile and firm handshake when we sit back and listen to it - fully satisfied. If we're both happy and it makes us feel something, then our job is done. We can't really set out to try and achieve anything more... it's just a selfishly focused thing from the outset. The fact that anyone else might like any given track off the album is all a bonus.

UDR: Describe the evolution of your relationship with Herb.

Rubens: This has been pretty interesting for us, as the way things have panned out, we are both now co-running the label with the founder, Craig Murphy. It's a long story, but the long and short of it is that we were both really impressed with Craig's energy and enthusiasm for the label and music in general and being geographically close (Gordon lives within a mile of Craig) it was natural that the artist/label relationship would start to blur. As it happened, a year down the line, it was obvious that we could add something to the label beyond being signed to them. So now we're onboard and working towards some hotly anticipated artist albums in 2007, from the likes of Engine7, Zerova, Skytree and Shamanic Technology - all exceptional talents.

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